Revision as of 01:51, 8 February 2013

This page is intended to help beginners get started with learning programming.
Eventually, I'd like to provide a whole series of steps, exercises and tutorials
about programming, to help anyone who would like to get involved with software development
or game development.

Note that the bottom area of the screen is a tabbed dialog with different areas:

"Questions Tips & Feedback Spin-Offs Documentation". "Spin-Offs" has sample programs related to the tutorial, video or program you're looking at, and "Documentation" has description of different functions or statements you can use in your programs.

Programming checklist

Follow these steps to learn how to program:

The very basics

learn what a program statement is (and what a "computer language" is)

learn what a variable is

learn what a conditional (if statement) is

learn what a loop is

learn what input is

different kinds of input (key press, mouse move, mouse button)

learn what output is

different kinds of output (text, image, sound)

Simple program 1:
Write a program that counts how many times someone presses the space bar.

Simple program 2:
Write a program that counts how many times someone presses each arrow key.

program 3:
Write a program that starts counting when someone presses the space bar,
and stops counting when they hit it a second time (like a stop-watch).

Program 4:
Write a program that moves a ball to the right on the screen, when the right arrow
is pressed.

Program 5:
Write a program that starts a ball moving when key is pressed. The ball
should keep moving until it hits a wall.

Note: For any of these programs, you can start with the program you used
previously, and expand or modify it to do the next task. You should
save it under a new name.

Program 6:
Write a program that starts a ball moving in a different direction, depending on
which arrow key (up, down, left, right) is pressed.

Program 7:
Write a program that starts with a moving ball. When the ball hits a wall,
it moves in the opposite direction.

Program 8:
Combine programs 6 and 7. Write a program that starts a ball in a direction
based on the key pressed. The ball should keep moving after the key is released.
It should bounce off the wall and go the other direction when it hits a wall.

Languages

Programming can be done in many different computer languages.

Web Programming

Programming can be done in a web browser. This is a computer
program, like Internet Explorer, Firefox or Chrome, that reads web pages
from the Internet and shows them on your screen. Embedded devices, like
phones, tablets and TVs also have web browsers.

In order to do web programming, you
first need to learn how the browser presents information from a web page
on your computer screen. It does this by processing the words on the
web page (called "parsing" the page), and then drawing things like text, lines
and images on your computer screen (usually, inside the browser window).

HTML

Basically, the words and symbols are put into a file (or returned from a program
running on the web server), and these words tell the web browser what to draw
on the screen. The process of drawing things on the screen is called "rendering" the page.